In recent weeks I have requested that parishioners bring in the blessed palms they took home last year.
You might have put those palms behind a holy picture that you gazed upon with mingled devotion, worry, and hopefulness. Or they might have gone into your wallet or purse, where, with similar feelings, you so often reached down to conduct commerce.
Having gathered those palms—with all your hopes and fears and dreams and concerns throughout the year—we now subject the collection to a communal incineration. All that, up in smoke!
If that weren’t enough, having reduced the palms to ashes, we shall further pulverize them and put them on future foreheads next Ash Wednesday as signs and motivators of repentance. Foreheads that renew themselves, on the cellular level, every moment.
The ash administrator immerses his thumb into the mess, smushes it around to get a good coat, and crosses the spot with the reminder of dust-ness and its causes, conditions, and conquests.
Perhaps these virulent times suggest we impose ashes with a device, but we prefer flesh (oh, don’t we?). The sudden inconvenience of contact wouldn’t daunt us from fortifying people with a micro-dose of mortality. The Coronavirus does a good job of that on its own!
The touch is two-way: you get something of my thumb, I of your forehead. Something of you returns on me to the ash-heap. As I press in for another application, your prayers, works, joys, sufferings, and sins mix with the ashes that others will receive.
More concretely, my thumb takes your makeup, dirt, and sweat: all the concealer, the concealed, and the energy channeled toward concealment. Each fingerprinting identifies each recipient as “sinner,” and the sin-ink implicates the persons behind and ahead.
Afterwards I have a hard time getting the ashes off my fingers. Following a bishop’s post-Confirmation custom, I squeeze lemon quarters before washing. How they sting this chronic nail-biter! How others’ faults often exacerbate my own!
Speaking of faults, I might exclaim, “What I go through for you!” until I hear it from the Lord’s lips, or rather see it in His paschal sacrifice.
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